It is finished

67 counties are done. 5:34:36 a.m. was the finishing time for a total time of 21 hours, 14 minutes and 42 seconds.

We have just finished in Bucks Pocket State park and have completed our finishing rituals.

Congratulations to Jim, Carey, Adam and myself on a job nicely done.

Stay tuned for the next trip!


=======================

That was what I was about to post. Due to a raging river blocking us from the final county no more than 200 yards before the ending point, we had to detour around, adding an additional 53 minutes and 58 seconds, ending at 6:28:32, and for a final time of 22 hours, 8 minutes, and 40 seconds. After averaging nearly 60 miles per hour for the trip, we averaged 0.0052 miles per hour to go the final 25 feet.

We hit our 66th county, Marshall, on an out and back at about 5:25 and then made our way into Bucks Pocket State park. As you can see from my message above, I was confident that we had completed the job.

In Bucks Pocket, we wound our way down the road. We saw a green sign that we thought was the final county sign and we wrote the finish time down. We began to celebrate as we turned the van around to illuminate the sign for proper finishing pictures. Then, we saw that it was some sort of camping sign. So we continued going forward down the road towards the county line. As we go around a bend, Jim sees the green county sign about 200 feet ahead and says "There it is" - following which, Carey yells out "Stop!", as the van plunges into a raging river.

Luckily, Jim had stopped in time and as steam arose from the van, we were able to pull it back out of the river. With the insane amount of rain we got yesterday (there was a flash flood warning at one point), the bridge over the river that marked the county line between DeKalb and Jackson (the final county) was washed out.

We got out and investigated crossing it but decided (wisely in my opinion) not to. Had it been 23:50 perhaps we would have tried it, but with 3 hours of buffer time we pulled back. We saw another option on the map but after about a 20-30 minute detour realized that the map was wrong and no entry to Jackson would be permitted from that direction either.

We finally managed to navigate around to the other side of Buck's Pocket, where we had been nearly an hour beforehand. We actually got into Jackson County about 10 minutes before that (at the times listed above), but continued down to the sign of our original defeat. We snapped pictures and had our way with Jackson County and called it complete.